The Internet has grown at a remarkable pace, and has become firmly entrenched in nearly all aspects of society. Whereas the Internet initially was limited to purely academic and government endeavors, the Internet has now become an important avenue of commercial activity, not to mention an important source of educational, commercial and entertainment-related information. Moreover, in addition to simply operating as a source of information, the Internet provides a mechanism for bringing together individuals and entities from across the globe. As an example, for business enterprises, the Internet provides the ability to interact electronically with customers, as well as suppliers, distributors and other business partners. Even in non-commercial areas, the Internet enables individuals sharing common interests and avocations to interact and share information with one another.
The Internet has also fostered a growth in electronic communications. Individuals are now able to communicate quickly and conveniently with one another using electronic mail, or email, as well as via instant messaging, text messaging, voice messaging, video messaging, etc. With email, for example, a central messaging service, typically implemented in one or more mail servers, maintains accounts for multiple users, with each account being associated with a particular email address. Often, the messaging service is associated with a particular domain, such that all of the email accounts managed by the service share a common domain. Users are able to send emails to other users by addressing emails to the specific email addresses of the other users, which may then be retrieved by those users via various types of protocols, e.g., HTTP or web-based mail, POP, IMAP, etc. A user's emails are typically downloaded to a web browser or mail client by connecting to the messaging service, enabling users to view their emails, reply or forward those emails to others, create new emails, and perform various other email management operations.
While the increasingly pervasive nature of electronic communications have provided significant benefits to users of the Internet, it also has brought with it a significant problem in the eyes of many individuals—unsolicited communications such as junk email, often derisively referred to as “spam.” In particular, the Internet has become an important medium through which commercial entities can effectively market their goods and services to potential customers. Electronic dissemination of advertisements is both fast and relatively inexpensive, since the content is often purely digital in nature. Unsolicited, direct market email messages, for example, can often be sent to thousands or millions of individuals at a time for extremely low cost. In addition, as new forms of electronic communications such as instant messaging, text messaging, etc. increase in popularity, advertisers will undoubtedly exploit these other avenues to reach consumers with unsolicited advertisements and other communications. Furthermore, spam is not expected to be limited to electronic textual or pictorial communications, as unsolicited communications may also incorporate voice, video, etc. In this regard, the term “spam” may be considered to incorporate unsolicited communications of any form, including emails, instant messages, video messages, text messages, and even telephone calls or direct non-electronic mail.
As a result of the increasing frustration that many individuals experience as a result of spam, significant efforts have been directed toward the development of privacy and spam avoidance tools to attempt to reduce the amount of spam received by individuals. In many instances, such tools rely on filtering to attempt to identify and block likely spam. Such filters typically are based upon analysis of the origination address of the communications, and in some instances, based upon the content of the communications. In both instances, however, spammers have developed workarounds that make it difficult to detect spam. For example, origination addresses can be spoofed so that the true sender is masked. Also, spammers often purposely misspell words that might trigger spam detection, but which are still understandable by an individual despite the misspelling. While filtering technology has improved substantially, spammers continue to develop new ways to thwart spam filters, so spam filter developers find themselves locked in a continual cat and mouse game with spammers.
An individual cannot be spammed unless a spammer has a valid address for that individual, and as a result, spammers expend significant efforts building mailing lists of valid addresses. More sophisticated individuals will of course not voluntarily give their addresses or any other private information about themselves to a spammer, so in some instances, deception may be used to obtain addresses or other private information that may be used to ascertain individuals' addresses.
As one example, individuals are often solicited for their email addresses and other private or personal information when visiting web sites. In many instances, this solicitation is simply necessary to enable the entity that controls the web site to provide information that has been requested by visitors to the web site. In an ecommerce application, for example, a web site may request an email address from a consumer making a purchase on the web site to enable the web site to forward a receipt and/or shipping notification to the consumer.
In some instances, however, the submission of an email address to a web site may result in the use of that email address for unsolicited communications, e.g., if the web site chooses to send advertisements to its prior customers. Moreover, the email address may be sold or otherwise provided to direct marketers or other third parties, who may then send their own unsolicited communications. Due to the number of potential parties involved, and the relatively minimal costs of spam emails and the like, a significant risk exists that an individual submitting an email address to a web site could begin receiving tens or hundreds of spam emails from numerous entities.
Many web sites subscribe to privacy policies and give visitors assurances that they will not use their private information for other uses. However, some less reputable entities may nonetheless misuse private information irrespective of any privacy policies that are in place, so privacy policies only provide limited assurances to individuals that their private information will not be misused.
Consequently, a significant need has arisen in the art for addressing individuals' justifiable trepidation over being spammed as a result of submitting email addresses and other private information to unknown entities such as web sites and the like.